Best posts made by Pyrephox

@derp Same reason I bounced off ESO. The decision not to instance most quest points in ESO is one that continues to baffle me. It is not 2000, and I should not have to wait in a line to kill a boss at the end of a dungeon!

@Ghost said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I want pho.

That is all.

Not enough upvotes. Pho is so good. now I want it too.

I know, for me, a lot of it HAS been just being so very tired and not having a lot of energy to start things, or reach out to new people to try and expand my character's social circle. Which leaves me, like, one other PC who my character interacts with. And they're a great PC, and I enjoy every scene, but it's just hard to have the energy to make new friends right now, and no one else has really 'clicked' right off hand with my PC.

A Gathering of Gargoyles, by Meredith Ann Pierce. The second in a very strange trilogy, it's my favorite of them all, although the whole trilogy is worth reading. It's a very melancholy and dreamy sort of book, with fun science fantasy sort of things.

This Time of Darkness, by H.M. Hoover. YA dystopia before dystopia was cool. The protagonist lives in a decaying, underground city and hooks up with the weirdo in her class to seek the world outside.

Little Fuzzy, by H. Beam Piper. But not the novel; I didn't read that until later. But they made a ridiculously beautiful kids' book version of it called The Adventures of Little Fuzzy that was one of my favorite books as a kid. Although I'm still not sure how it got made, considering one of the adorable fuzzy aliens gets straight up murdered by the bad guys.

The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley. The companion/prequel to The Blue Sword mentioned up above. I read this one first, and so I loved it more.

@ganymede The lack of IC/OOC divide where there really SHOULD be some is, perhaps, at the root of the whole problem. And "If my character loses, I lose" is a cognition that doesn't spring out of nowhere. If you're actually saying as a game policy that social contests between characters will be resolved based on the skills of the players involved, then a loss for a character IS a loss for that player. Assuming they were trying their best to be a slick social maven, they've just been labeled a failure in that endeavor, possibly in a hugely public way on the game. Not their character, but THEM. So it certainly isn't going to help.

There is no absolute IC/OOC divide - ultimately, characters exist because we OOC want them to do so, and they attempt to do things that we OOC want them to do. But that doesn't mean that the entire concept of 'this is a character's skills and abilities' and 'this is a player's skills and abilities' needs to be tossed out.

If you want to cross the IC/OOC divide in a more productive way, then encourage collaboration in social systems, and make it rewarding for players who are perhaps more skilled or savvy regarding social interaction to HELP players who are less so succeed in directing their socially oriented characters.

I am about to finally get to play 13th Age rather than run it and I'm so happy. The gm plans to take us all the way through the Eyes of the Stone Thief, too.

Hi!

Could you talk a little more about what kinds of things you see PCs doing on the game, and how the rotating setting will be an asset?

I'm intrigued by the idea, but I admit that I worry that without strong human presence or constant things in the 'mundane' world for PCs to get attached to, it'll be hard to capture that passionate longing and envy of Created towards humans.

@cirim13 Hidden Legacy would make a very fun setting for a tabletop game, but I suspect it would be a TRAINWRECK in a MU*. Mind you, it would be an entertaining trainwreck, and I would absolutely play there.

@ganymede I fundamentally disagree, based on my own experiences. And since each of our experiences are subjective, and there's no objective data that I know of which supports either, I suppose this is where we break out the old 'agree to disagree' canard.

I will say, despite the flaws of both games, after playing Kingsmouth, I lost most of my interest in WoD MUs, because of their lack of support for social systems - and after playing Arx, I can't ever see myself going back to a WoD MU where social skills are just a meaningless XP sink and used for fueling supernatural powers. So I wouldn't be the target audience for a WoD game without social stats in the first place.

But, if one ever gets made, I hope that it's fun for the people who choose to play there, and that it does well!

I think I've been 'into' writing most of my life. I think the first story I can recall writing because I wanted to write it, not because it was a school assignment, was 3rd or 4th grade, and by the time I was in high school I had notebooks filled with story fragments, terrible adolescent poetry, and worldbuilding and plots for gaming campaigns.

As to whether MUing is writing - it absolutely is! But I definitely think it teaches some fundamentally different habits and techniques than writing fiction - and that some of those habits and techniques are /bad/ for writing fiction (and vice versa, of course. Trying to plot your MU character's 'story' in the same way you would a novel character is a recipe for sadness and disappointment, and novel plots tend to not make good MU* plots, while good MU* plots would tend to be far more chaotic and unfocused than a good novel would prefer). So I wouldn't recommend a MU* for people who want to learn 'to write', and honestly think that if you want to write fiction, MU*ing less is the best choice.

Although that may be my own bias, since the two activities take up the same brainspace in my head, and I can't do both at once.

@botulism Cool! Thank you for elaborating. It sounds really interesting, although Promethean is one of those lines that I don't know a damn thing about. Might be worth learning, though!

@ganymede No worries! It's been an interesting discussion.

And, what I MIGHT suggest, if you don't want PCs to be able to affect each other directly with social skills/abilities, is to have robust mechanics for affecting NPCs in meaningful ways. Like, going back to the games up above, on Kingsmouth, social skills made your character better at controlling territory, and allowed indirect conflicts by screwing with NPCs within other territories. Likewise, with Arx, there's very little (that I know of) direct use of intimidation and seduction, despite those being skills, but they CAN be very useful in @actions and GMed scenes. Which gives people a sense of utility and power and agency, without needing to directly 'change' another PC's mind or actions.

However, if you do that, I'd say the systems need to be equally or more powerful than PCs' abilities to use physical or supernatural means to directly change other character's minds (or take them out of the conflict directly).

Still, that's only my thought on it.

@derp said in Good TV:

@wretched said in Good TV:

I am really loving season 2 of Evil.

It's so good. It's everything I was hoping it would be so far. Moving at a good enough pace to keep the story going with the built-up momentum but not just dumping it all on you at once as the world adjusts in all these little ways.

Augh, I have to catch up.

@FoxStevenson Single sphere Changeling seems to be a real struggle of a game to keep up and running. The only one I've seen that lasted any appreciable amount of time was the first iteration of Darkwater, so don't feel badly. I was enjoying it, although I had to disappear for RL stuff, and then just couldn't get back into the swing of things. I think it's doubly hard to take over something for a friend - MU*s really seem to need to be a project of passion, because they're pretty thankless otherwise.

But it was a great setting, and a fun game, while it lasted.

@ganymede No, Roz was correct about my intention. I do think that sort of policy directly encourages players who want to manipulate people OOC, which is one reason why I won't play a game that uses it.

Darkwater was my second long-term MU*, and still one of my favorites. I've enjoyed a number of the games you've run, and will miss you! But you absolutely have to do what's best and healthiest for you.

@faraday Oooh, it works in incognito mode. Thank you!

@arkandel It is a crime that one can only upvote a post once.

And yes, negotiation with the GM is an extremely common thing in many tabletop systems. In fact, more modern narrative based systems have even moved towards giving more of that power to PCs. Like, 13th Age, which does adventurous high fantasy, has 'backgrounds' instead of skills, and successfully rolling on a background allows a player to TELL the GM how their background is relevant to the situation, including to the point of changing the world around them - "I am a Former Captain of the Imperial Guard," (roll success) "so it's not hard for me to find one of the guards at the ball who owes me a favor, and he lets us crash the party, as long as we don't rat him out if we get caught."

Other systems, realizing that players do not have the skills of their characters, incorporate that into skill checks. For example, having a Tactics skill, where yes, the player can roll for their character to come up with a decent plan, and the GM can outline the plan they come up with and give them a bonus to actions to execute that plan. (Something will still go wrong, because GAME, but it won't be because a player is not the tactician that their character is). Even WoD has a merit called Common Sense that allows: "Whenever you are about to do something contrary to common sense, the Storyteller should alert you to how your potential action might violate practicality within the mundane realm (often an Intelligence roll). This is an ideal Merit if you are a novice player because it allows you to receive advice from the Storyteller concerning what you can and cannot do, and (even more importantly) what you should and should not do."

EDIT: The new edition of 7th Sea actually has you roll your successes/raises in advance of the scene, and then decide where/when to spend them throughout the scene, which I always thought was an interesting way to do it, too. You have a general idea of your competence to start out, but are not /exactly/ sure of WHAT you'll be competent at.

Because forcing players to rely only on their own skills when they want to play characters who are competent at things that they never had a chance to practice OOC is not a recipe for fun.

I think you are the longest consistent person who I've known in MU*dom, and it was always and ever a pleasure. Every single time, in every game. My condolences on your loss, and I hope that when we finally (FINALLY) get through the pandemic, you can settle into something that is wonderful. Because you deserve that!

@dnvnquinn said in Your yearly 'Active WOD' request thread.:

@pyrephox I haven't dipped into Ares yet. But the lack of anything else might drive me to the platform.

There is one CoD MU* on Ares: Obsidian Reverie. They're in a cyberpunk setting right now, though, so it's not exactly a standard WoD experience. But I remembered it!